Leading workforce thinking 2008

4 - 6 November 2008
International Conference Centre, Birmingham

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for attending Leading workforce thinking, NHS Employers' annual conference and exhibition in Birmingham. The event was hugely successful, with over 1800 delegates, speakers and exhibitors - our biggest conference yet.

This year's event focused on staff engagement and the patient experience and delegates heard from some of the key people in health, as well as experts from outside the health sector, and made the most of the opportunity to network with friends and colleagues.

What did you think?

The feedback you gave us from last year's annual conference and exhibition helped us to shape this year's event. We value your views and want to know what you think. NHS Employers is committed to improving the standard of all its services, including this event. All information and comments will remain confidential.

If you didn't manage to complete an evaluation form on the day, please fill in our online evaluation form.

Date for your diary

Leading workforce thinking will take place from 3-5 November 2009 at the ICC in Birmingham. Visit the NHS Employers website regularly for our work throughout the year and ways to get involved.

Listen again

The latest audio files from the key sessions at the conference are now available in our listen again section.

Speaker presentations

If you are a registered delegate at the event you can now download some of the speaker presentations.

Presentations are copyright of NHS Employers and are for your sole use only.

Conference news - Thursday 6 November

Health Minister Ann Keen MP announced a £500,000 fund for employers and unions to develop partnerships locally on the final day of NHS Employers' annual conference in Birmingham today. She said: "I want staff to feel supported and actively engaged in the organisation in which they work. Employers and unions working constructively together can make a real difference to the improvement of quality workplaces."

Earlier delegates heard from Secretary of State for Health Alan Johnson who joined the conference via video link to answer questions. He encouraged trusts to prioritise training and assured employers there would be no surprises in the delayed operating framework.

Inspiring passion was a key theme from Sahar Hashemi, founder of Coffee Republic, in this morning's opening session. She encouraged delegates to be creative in their work and to reignite the passion in themselves, and staff throughout their organisations, to become innovative and overcome the resistance they are bound to face when implementing change.

Conference news - Wednesday 5 November

Staff engagement was an overriding theme of NHS Employers' annual conference today with David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS in England, seeing it as critical to delivering transformational change and echoing delegates' concerns that a lack of it was one of the biggest threats to the NHS meeting its future challenges. He outlined four priorities for the NHS: quality, leadership, innovation, and the NHS Constitution and described a new style of NHS leadership that involved engaging with patients and local communities. He said: "We're simply not delivering the numbers and quality of leaders that we need. We need to do something about that and we need to do it in an environment that is quite different from the past."

Earlier, NHS Confederation policy director Nigel Edwards had outlined some of the developing trends in healthcare policy and how the NHS needed to address current issues including the credit crunch and climate change. He said we had to move the idea of productivity beyond 'better, faster, cheaper' to transformational change.

Gareth Malone, from the BBC series 'The Choir' continued the theme of change in the afternoon, recounting stories of his experiences turning around the attitudes of students to singing and helping to shape them into functioning teams. He then turned his talents to delegates, leading them through several songs.

Conference news - Tuesday 4 November

NHS Employers' annual conference opened with an upbeat mood among HR and workforce leaders today as they looked to the priorities of service redesign and staff engagement to deliver better patient and staff experiences. Joint acting directors of NHS Employers, Alastair Henderson and Sian Thomas, welcomed delegates saying that the delivery of the quality agenda depends on the commitment of engaged staff and that the HR profession is strong, confident and ready to take its work to the next level. Using interactive voting, 72 per cent of delegates said they were positive or very positive about the workforce agenda, reflecting similar results in our pre-conference poll (see our media release for details).

The Department of Health's Director General of Workforce, Clare Chapman, gave the opening keynote speech, emphasising that high quality patient care requires high quality workplaces and purposeful leadership is needed to deliver this. She said that she wanted to see HR investing in its own skills and the next generation of HR professionals so that every HR professional in the NHS felt fully equipped to improve patient care. She saw the staff pledges as a key way to ensure that workplaces deliver what staff and patients need. She said: 'As the NHS cares for the nation, so we should care for the staff in the NHS.'